Athanasios I Gamolo (d. 631) [Syr. Orth.]

Long-serving
patr.
of the Syr. Orth. Church in the late 6th and early 7th
cent. His consecration is commonly dated to 594 or 595, but there is
confusion in the sources as to the exact date: medieval and modern authors
have also suggested 587, 597, and 603 as possibilities. All sources agree
that Athanasios died in 631 and one gives 28 July as the precise day (Chronica Minora, vol. 2, ed. E. W. Brooks, p.
144).

Athanasios was ordained
patr.
against his will. Afterwards, his bishops
agreed to allow him to return to his monastery for a year to complete the
task which had been assigned him there: tending camels. When the bishops
came to collect Athanasios a year later, they found him working in a mud
pit, helping to patch up a camel stable. This association with camels earned
him the epithet Gamolo ‘Camel Driver.’

Athanasios’s patriarchate spanned a tumultuous period in the history of the
Near East: the Byzantine-Persian wars of the early 7th cent. Most of
Athanasios’s actions recorded in historical sources relate to his
confronting the implications for the church of changing political orders; in
the course of his service he dealt either directly or indirectly with both
Byzantine and Persian rulers.

Athanasios is credited with reorganizing the structure of the Syr. Orth.
Church in the Persian Empire. He appointed bishops there and gave Dayro d-Mor Matay primacy over all other monasteries in the
Persian Empire.

In perhaps 629–30, Athanasios, along with twelve bishops, met with the
Emperor Heraclius for twelve days in Mabbug and held theological
discussions. When they ultimately refused to accept the Council of
Chalcedon, Heraclius became enraged and unleashed a persecution on
Miaphysites throughout the Empire.

In either 610 or 616, Athanasios and Anastasius, the Miaphysite
patr.
of
Alexandria, ended the Tritheist schism which had divided the two churches
since the late 6th-cent. dispute between Damian and Peter of Kallinikos.

The ‘Conflict of Severus’ (PO 4 and PO 49.4), which exists in Coptic
fragments as well as in Arabic and Ethiopic, is the only stand-alone work of
Athanasios which survives. His other extant works are all to be found
embedded in the Chronicle of Michael Rabo. They
include: a letter of Athanasios to Quryaqos of Amid (vol. 2, 381–94;
vol. 4, 392–9); the synodicon established by Athanasios and Anastasios,
patr.
of Alexandria, ending the Tritheist schism (vol. 2, 381–93; vol. 4,
392–9); an encyclical of Athanasios to the bps. of the East (vol. 2, 394–9;
vol. 4, 400–2); a libellus of Athanasios to Heraclius
(vol. 2, 405–8; vol. 4, 404–8); and a letter to the monks of Mor Matay (vol.
2, 414–7; vol. 4, 411–3).